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In recent years highly publicized educational commentators like David Horowitz (2000, 2006a, 2006b) and the team of Alan Charles Kors and Har-vey Silverglate (1998), as also Allan Bloom (1987), have been promoting many of the major agenda items for the New Right with regard to higher education policy in the United States. Central among these is a resurgent racism1 and the reactionary claim in such books as Horowitz’s Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (2000) that an ostensible racism against whites on the part of so-called leftwing and totalitarian academics is oppressing conservative student and faculty voices. They charge that freedom of speech has been betrayed in the American university system by campus codes attempting to regulate bigoted outbursts against ethnic minority groups in our society. One key premise undergirding the New Right’s contention is their cov-eted assumption that democratic institutions must maintain deference toward, and an absolute tolerance of, abusive and even assaultive speech—as protected forms of expression. 2

In sharp contrast to this approach, a strategy for the defense of minority civil rights and solidarity with subaltern victims of hate speech has been developed by authors like Dolores Calderón (see chapter 9 in this volume), Christine Sleeter and Dolores Delgado Bemal (2003), Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (1997), Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1993), and John K. Wilson (1995). These authors, developing what has become known as Critical Race Theory, argue that freedom of speech must be viewed in the context of …